Here, then, we have the experimental confirmation of what I have called the 'infernal dialectics' in man's condition. It is not, as the facile catch -- phase goes, his 'innate aggressiveness' (i.e., his self-assertive tendency) which transforms harmless citizens into torturers, but their self-transcending devotion to a cause, symbolized by the Prof in the role of the leader. It is the integrative tendency acting as a vehicle or catalyst which induces the change of morality, the abrogation of personal responsibility, the replacement of the individual's code of behaviour by the code of the 'higher component' in the hierarchy. In the course of this fatal process, the individual becomes to a certain extent de-personalized; he no longer functions as an autonomous holon or part-whole, but merely as a part. Janus no longer has two faces -- only one is left, looking upward in holy rapture or in a moronic daze.
The final conclusions which Milgram drew from his experiments are in keeping with the present theory:
This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the internal resources needed to resist authority . . . [14] The behaviour revealed in the experiments reported here is normal human behaviour but revealed under conditions that show with particular clarity the danger to human survival inherent in our make-up. And what is it we have seen? Not aggression, for there is no anger, vindictiveness, or hatred in those who shocked the victim. Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures. This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival. It is ironic that the virtues of loyalty, discipline, and self-sacrifice that we value so highly in the individual are the very properties that create destructive organizational engines of war and bind men to malevolent systems of authority . . . [15]
4
I said earlier on that the metamorphosis of individual minds into the group-mind does not necessarily require the individual's physical presence in a group or crowd, only an act of identification with the group -- its beliefs, traditions, leadership, and/or its emotion-rousing symbols. Thus in the case of Milgram's experiments, the 'teachers' became members of an invisible group -- the awe-inspiring academic hierarchy, the priesthood of Science -- whose wisdom and authority were represented by the Prof. But once committed, they found themselves in a trap -- a 'closed system', easily entered, but difficult to get out of. The integrative tendency, which provides the binding forces within the group, manifests itself in various ways which we have discussed before, but they all carry a high emotive voltage, far beyond rational expectation: Milgram's results drastically refuted the predictions of psychiatrists -- and of commonsense.
Some more recent experiments by Henri Tajfel and his team at Bristol University produced equally unexpected phenomena in a different context. Parties of schoolboys aged 14 to 15 were subjected to a quick -- and bogus -- psychological test; then each boy was told that he was either a 'Julius person or an 'Augustus person'. No explanation was given of the characteristics of the Julius or Augustus people, nor did the boys know who the other members of their group were. Nevertheless, they promptly identified with their fictitious group, proud to be a Julius person or an Augustus person to such an extent that they were willing to make financial sacrifices to benefit their anonymous group brothers, and to cause discomfort in the other camp.
The procedure followed in this and later experiments was rather complicated; instead of going into more detail I shall quote the summary given by Nigel Calder, who has done much to bring Tajfel's findings to public attention:
The experiments that began with the Bristol schoolboys have given points of reference in a broad ocean of human social behaviour that previously seemed unnavigable for science. Many a theory had been launched in vain. Some, like those of Sigmund Freud and Konrad Lorenz, offered the innate aggressiveness of the individual as the source of conflict between groups -- a world war being somehow like a pub brawl that got out of hand . . . [16] Yet the big problem all along has been to explain why well-behaved young men will so readily go out and kill other well-behaved young men, not in a frenzied horde but in disciplined formation. A forceful challenge to the 'individualistic' point of view has come from the social psychologist Henri Tajfel. He points to the drastic shift in the norms of human behaviour, when one group confronts another. What comes into play is the capacity of people to act in unison, in accordance with the laws and structure of society, largely irrespective of individual motives and feelings . . . In a remarkable series of experiments Tajfel and his colleagues at Bristol University have shown that you can alter a person's behaviour predictably, just by telling him he belongs to a group -- even a group of which he has never before heard. Almost automatically the participant in these experiments favours anonymous members of his own group and, given the opportunity, he is likely to go out of his way to put members of another group at a disadvantage . . . People will stick up for a group to wbich they happen to be assigned, without any indoctrination about who else is in the group or what its qualities are supposed to be . . . [17] Only by grasping the full import of the positive and quick propensity of human beings to identify with any group they find themselves in can one make a firm base from which to search out the origins of hostility . . . [18]
I found these experiments extremely revealing, not only on theoretical grounds but also for personal reasons, related to a childhood episode which has never ceased to puzzle and amuse me. On my first day at school, aged five, in Budapest, Hungary, I was asked by my future class-mates the crucial question: 'Are you an MTK or an FTC?' These were the initials of Hungary's two leading soccer teams, perpetual rivals for the League championship, as every schoolboy knew -- except little me, who had never been taken to a football match. However, to confess such abysmal ignorance was unthinkable, so I replied with haughty assurance: 'MTK, of course!' And thus the die was cast; for the rest of my childhood in Hungary, and even when my family moved to Vienna, I remained an ardent and loyal supporter of MTK; and my heart still goes out to them, all the way across the Iron Curtain. Moreover, their glamorous blue-and-white striped shirts never lost their magic, whereas the vulgar green-and-white stripes of their unworthy rivals still fill me with revulsion. I am even inclined to believe that this early conversion played a part in making blue my favourite colour. (After all, the sky is blue, a primary colour, whereas green is merely the product of its adulteration with yellow.) I may laugh at myself, but the emotive attachment, the magic bond, is still there, and to shift my loyalty from the blue-white MTK to the green-white FTC would be downright blasphemy. Truly, we pick up our allegiances like infectious germs. Even worse, we walk through life unaware of this pathological disposition, which lures mankind from one historic disaster into the next.
5
From the dawn of recorded history, human societies have always been fairly successful in restraining the self-assertive tendencies of the individual -- until the howling little savage in its cot became transformed into a more or less law-abiding and civilized member of society. The same historical record testifies to mankind's tragic inability to induce a parallel sublimation of the integrative tendency. Yet, to say it again, both the glory and the pathology of the human condition derive from our powers of self-transcendence, which are equally capable of turning us into artists, saints or killers, but more likely into killers. Only a small minority is capable of canalizing the self-transcending urges into creative channels. For the vast majority, throughout history, the only fulfilment of its need to belong, its craving for communion, was identification with clan, tribe, nation, Church, or party, submission
to its leader, worship of its symbols, and uncritical, child-like acceptance of its emotionally saturated system of beliefs. Thus we are faced with a contrast between the mature restraint of the self-assertive tendency and the immature vagaries of the integrative tendency, strikingly revealed whenever the group-mind takes over from the individual mind, whether at a political rally or in the psychological laboratory.
To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertion incurs the penalties of society -- he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand, becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his Church or party, or whatever social holon to which he surrenders his identity. For the process of identification in its cruder forms always entails, as we have seen, a certain impairment of individuality, an abdication of the critical faculties and of personal responsibility.
This leads us to a basic distinction between primitive or infantile forms of identification, and mature forms of integration into a social holarchy. In a well-balanced holarchy, the individual retains his character as a social holon, a part-whole who, qua whole, enjoys autonomy within the limits of the restraints imposed by the interests of the group. He remains an autonomous whole in his own right, and is even expected to assert his holistic attributes by originality, initiative and, above all, personal responsibility. The same considerations apply to the social holons on the higher levels of the hierarchy -- clans and tribes, ethnic and religious communities, professional groups and political parties. They, too, ought ideally to display the virtues implied in the Janus principle: to function as autonomous wholes and at the same time to conform to the national interest; and so on, upwards, level by level, to the world community at the apex of the pyramid. An ideal society of this kind would possess 'hierarchic awareness', every holon on every level being conscious both of its rights as a whole and its duties as a part.
Needless to say, the mirror of history, past and present, confronts us with a different picture.
6
Those dramatic manifestations of mass-hysteria which so much impressed Freud and Le Bon I have only mentioned in passing, because I meant to focus attention on the process of 'normal' group-formation and its devastating effects on the history of our species. This 'normal' process, as we have seen, involves identification with the group, and acceptance of its beliefs. An important side-effect of the process is to deepen the split between emotion and reason. For the group-mind is dominated by a system of beliefs, traditions, moral imperatives, with a high emotive potential regardless of its rational content; and quite frequently its explosive power is enhanced by its very irrationality. Faith in the group's credo is an emotional commitment; it anaesthetizes the individual's critical faculties and rejects rational doubt as something evil. Moreover, individuals are endowed with minds of varying complexity, while the group must be single-minded if it is to maintain its cohesion as a holon. Consequently, the group-mind must function on an intellectual level accessible to all its members: single-mindedness must be simple-minded. The overall result of this is the enhancement of the emotional dynamics of the group and simultaneous reduction of its intellectual faculties: a sad caricature of the ideal of hierarchic awareness.
7
I mentioned earlier on the paranoid streak which runs through History. Enlightened people may be quite willing to admit that such a streak existed among the head-hunters of Papua or in the Aztec kingdom, where the number of young men, virgins and children sacrificed to the gods amounted to between 20,000 and 50,000 per annum. 'In this state of things,' commented Prescott,
... it was beneficially ordered by Providence that the land should be delivered over to another race, who would rescue it from the brutish superstitions that daily extended wider and wider . . . The debasing institutions of the Aztecs furnish the best apology for their conquest. It is true, the conquerors brought along with them the Inquisition. But they also brought Christianity, whose benign radiance would still survive, when the fierce flames of fanaticism should be extinguished ... [19]
Prescott must have known, though, that shortly after the Mexican conquest, the 'benign radiance' of Christianity manifested itself in the Thirty Years War, which killed off a goodly proportion of Europe's population. And so on to Auschwitz and Gulag. Yet even clear-sighted people who recognize the mental disorder underlying these horrors are apt to dismiss them as phenomena of the past. It is not easy to love humanity and yet to admit that the paranoid streak, in different guises, is as much in evidence in contemporary history as it was in the distant past, but more potentially deadly in its consequences; and that it is not accidental but inherent in the human condition.
'Chairman Mao's swim across the Yangtze river', wrote the official New China Agency,' . . . was a great encouragement to the Chinese people and revolutionaries throughout the world, and a heavy blow to imperialism, modern revisionism and the monsters and freaks who are opposed to socialism and Mao Tse-tung's thought.' [20]
The symptoms vary with time, but the underlying pattern of the disorder is the same: the split between faith and reason, rational thought and irrational beliefs. Religious beliefs are derived from ever-recurrent archetypal motifs, which seem to be shared by all mankind and evoke instant emotive responses.* But once they become institutionalized as the collective property of a specific group, they degenerate into rigid doctrines which, without losing their emotive appeal, are potentially offensive to the critical faculties. To paste over the split, various forms of double-think have been designed at various times -- powerful techniques of self-deception, some crude, some extremely sophisticated. The same fate has befallen the secular religions which go by the name of political ideologies. They too have their archetypal roots -- the craving for utopia, for an ideal society; but when they crystallize into movements and parties, they can become distorted to such an extent that the actual policy they pursue is the direct opposite of their professed ideal. This apparently inevitable tendency of both religious and secular ideologies to degenerate into their own caricatures is a direct consequence of the characteristics of the group-mind which we have discussed: its need for intellectual simplicity combined with emotional arousal.
* See, for instance, 'William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, still a classic in this field. A more recent treatment is offered by Sir Alister Hardy in The Divine Flame and The Biology of God.
Irrational beliefs are saturated with emotion; they are felt to be true. Believing has been described as 'knowing with one's viscera'. And visceral knowledge, whether innate or acquired, is mediated by the 'old brain'. We often describe our affect-charged judgements -- mistakenly -- as 'instinctive reactions'. They are not. But they have the same elemental, reason-defying, old-brain power as true instincts. At this point the psychological considerations of the present chapter lead straight back to the neurophysiological theories discussed in the Prologue. The schizophysiology of the brain provides an essential clue to the streak of insanity running though the history of man.
Our cherished beliefs are of course neither exclusive products of the human neocortex, nor of the 'old brain' which we share with the lower mammals, but of their combined activities. Their degree of irrationality varies according to which level dominates and to what extent. Between the theoretical extremes of 'pure logic' and 'blind passion' there are many levels of mental activity, as we find them in primitives at various stages of development, in children at various ages, and in adults in various states of consciousness (lucid, daydreaming, dreaming, hallucinating, etc.). Each of these types of mental activity is governed by its own 'rules of the game' which reflects the complex interactions of the old and new structures in the brain. For interact they must all the time -- even if their coordination is inadequate, and deficient in the effective controls which lend stability to a well-ordered holarchy. Thus even abstract verbal symbols become imbued with emotive values and visceral reactions -- as the psycho-galvanic lie-detector so dramati
cally shows. And that applies even more, of course, to doctrines and ideologies amplified by the group-mind. Unfortunately we cannot apply a lie-detector to measure the irrationality of its beliefs, nor its explosive and devastating potential.
V
AN ALTERNATIVE TO DESPAIR
1
As long as we believed that our species was potentially immortal, with an astronomical lifespan before it, we could afford to wait patiently for that evolutionary change in human nature which, gradually or suddenly, would make love and sweet reason prevail. But man's biological evolution came to a virtual standstill in Cro-Magnon days, 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. We cannot wait another 100,000 years for the unlikely chance mutation which will put things right; we can only hope to survive by inventing techniques which supplant biological evolution. That is to say, we must search for a cure for the schizophysiology endemic in our nature, which led into the situation in which we find ourselves. If we fail to find that cure, the old paranoid streak in man, combined with his new powers of destruction, must sooner or later lead to his extinction. But I also believe that the cure is not far beyond the reach of contemporary biology; and that with the proper concentration of efforts it might enable man to win the race for survival.
Janus: A Summing Up Page 11
